March’s Mid-month Roundup of the Best Open Source, Linux, and Web Hosting Content

If you’ve been following us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, you’ll know that we like to use those channels to share the most interesting content that we come across each day. Realizing that it can be hard for to find the quality stories in all the noise and clutter, we decided to to collect the best articles we’ve read each month and create this roundup for our readers. Since this is our first edition, we’ve included the best so far from March as well a few from February. We hope you find these posts valuable and informative. Enjoy!

Open Source and Linux

Usually there are two ways to look forward to buy a Raspberry Pi: first, think about a strange thing to make, and then go to the website; or second, buy the Raspberry Pi board having no idea of what you are going to do with it.

The open source movement has been responsible for many great innovations over the past few decades. Linux, the Apache Web Server, and Rails are just a few examples of open source projects that have elevated the web industry to new heights.

Open source software powers the world’s technology. In the past decade, there has been an inexorable adoption of open source in most aspects of computing. Without open source, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and nearly every other modern technology company would not exist.

The biggest driving factor for software developers to work together with open source is cost. It is much cheaper for them to cooperate through open source than it is to remain isolated with proprietary software, asserted Inktank VP of Product Management Neil Levine.

A good bit of the feedback on my most recent post about installing Fedora on my new laptop was along the lines of “instead of telling us what doesn’t work, please give us some information about what options we have which do work.”

Unless you’ve been granted magical powers, odds are you’ve broken your operating system installation at one point in your life. And despite Ubuntu’s stability, it’s entirely possible to break a fresh installation.

Support for Windows XP officially ends on April 8, 2014. After this date Microsoft will no longer issues security updates, patch exploits or provide any other means of official, direct support to its users.

It’s no secret that many people are getting interested at owning websites and making money online. There have been too many stories already about people who were down on their luck career-wise but took a chance to start a new one online—which paid off.

On Wednesday I gave a presentation on “How to Avoid Common (but Deadly) MySQL Development Mistakes” for Percona MySQL Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides.

Interesting News

You’ve probably never heard of DuckDuckGo. And, no, it’s not a game kids play. We’d say it’s just a small alternative search engine with a silly name, but it’s more than that. Once you know what it is, you might not go back to Google. Or Bing. Or Yahoo.

The implosion of Mt. Gox, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, has many cryptocurrency believers and government entities alike agreeing on one thing: The Bitcoin economy needs some kind of regulation to prevent fraud and rebuild trust with users.

And that’s it for this opening edition. Feel free to share any stories that we may have missed in the comment section. This month we’ll leave you the Linux Foundation’s play on the Facebook “look back” videos.